food safety

Californians seem to be doing everything right these days. Achieving the tall and slender beach-body look, eating less than kids in other states, and now likely voting to enforce a new law that would require labeling of genetically engineered food. Is there anything they aren’t doing right? Well, maybe.

If approved, California would be the first state in the nation to require GMO labeling. And according to a recent poll by California Right to Know, it’s likely to happen as nine out of 10 California voters want the labeling to be enforced.

However, new research on the effectiveness of food labeling suggests it may not be the one-cure-fix-all solution Californians, and other health-conscious Americans, are looking for. This is because a labeling initiative may end up making it harder for consumers to know what’s in their food, since it makes the definition of ‘natural’ food very unclear.

When we think of the word natural when it relates to food, we think organic, healthy, and no artificial preservatives, flavorings or ingredients. But apparently the term natural is becoming much harder to define, especially since the federal government has refused to make the term any clearer, allowing food companies to continue labeling their food as ‘natural’ when it may very well not be. Read Full Post >

TheU.S. Department of Agriculture has confirmed a case of Mad Cow disease in a dairy cow in Fresno, California. The dead animal tested positive for the disease and experts are now completing an investigation to ensure no other cows have been infected. Thus far, no sign of the disease has been detected in the cow feed, which is a positive sign.

Mad Cow, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE – is a fatal disintegration of the brain and nervous system. Although it’s most commonly found in cows, it can also infect humans if they ingest the meat of a cow with the disease.

One such instance occurred in the U.K. close to 30 years ago, when nearly 200 hundred people were infected with the disease after an outbreak. One extreme case left one man blind, deaf and immobile from 2001 until his death in 2011.

More than 4.4 million cows were slaughtered in the 1980s to control this outbreak after close to 180,000 cows were found to have the disease.Read Full Post >

As if fish identity swapping wasn’t concerning enough, new research published in the Journal of Food Science has identified the top seven foods with commonly altered ingredients as olive oil, milk, honey, saffron, orange juice, coffee, and apple juice, proving food fraud is alive and well; and unfortunately, flourishing.

In light of growing concerns regarding food safety, the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) has compiled a public database with reports on food fraud and economically-motivated adulteration of food, which is the first of its kind. Researchers behind the database say getting this information published was key in giving the study credibility so that food fraud can become a more important and valid public concern.

The database provides information necessary to properly assess the risks of certain products, with a list of 1,305 records of food fraud instances from 66 scholarly, media and other public reports. The database also includes potential adulterants – or substances that corrupt, debase, or make impure by the addition of a foreign substance - that could reappear in the supply chain for particular ingredients, as well as analytical testing strategies to detect food fraud. Read Full Post >

If there was a machine that could detect whether your hamburger was really grass-fed like the label says it is, would you use it? Picarro - the company behind a piece of technology that’s capable of doing so – hopes you’d say yes. Because they think you’d be surprised to find out what’s really in your food.

Based in Silicon Valley, Picarro is a highly reputable company that specializes in carbon and water cycle measurements. They’ve developed an instrument that’s capable of detecting isotopes in food called an ‘optical stable isotope analyzer.’ And although it sounds complicated, the way it works is actually quite simple.

According to Picarro Business Director Iain Green – whom we contacted via email – carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) are the same molecules that plants photosynthesize to create the sugars, oils and other organic material. And since isotopic signatures vary around the world, so do crops. And depending on the plate type and region it’s grown, crops absorb different ratios of these molecules and therefore have unique isotopic signatures.

An example of this? Sugar cane grown in Hawaii has a different ‘signature’ than sugar grown from corn in the Midwest. And cocoa grown on the Ivory Coast has a different ‘signature’ than cocoa grown in Ghana. And Picarro can tell the difference after one little test. Read Full Post >

Ractopamine, ever heard of it? Probably not. However, this feed additive is rather controversial and is causing international waves.

Ractopamine is fed to American livestock in order to promote lean meat. Currently, it is fed to about 60 to 80 percent of the pigs in America and as a result, there have been numerous reports of dead and sickened pigs. No other livestock drug has caused such high numbers of death and illness according to an investigation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Since the drug was introduced, over 218,000 pigs on ractopamine have been reported to show very adverse effects. Since March 2011, the drug has caused the majority of problems in pigs even though other livestock animals are on the drug. Pigs are suffering from hyperactivity, trembling, broken limbs, the inability to walk, and death. These results were gathered from a FDA report that was released under a Freedom of Information Act request. Even though these disturbing things are happening to the livestock, the FDA says the data can’t determine that the drug caused these effects.

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